mozaikmage

I have mixed feelings about Keina Suda/balloon's musical ouevre. Like I like it, but I don't, but I like it, but I don't. I've listened to Ghost Pop all the way through four times and Mellow dozens more but I wish more than anything that he'd rerecord it with someone else singing instead.

Let me back up a bit.

My first encounter with balloon was Eve's cover of Mabel popping up on my YouTube autoplay back when I was just starting to get into Eve (and I liked him way before it was cool, for the record. This was in like 2018.) I love Eve's voice. I find it soothing, not too nasal, not too high, not too low. Hearing him in an unexpected anime op or a cameo in someone else's song fills me with delight.

Now, Eve covered a few balloon songs in his utaite days, Rain and Petra being the other song relevant to my journey. I hadn't heard of the originals before, so I looked up balloon's channel, and clicked the video for Rain and Petra featuring vflower.

I turned it off immediately.

I'm not a big vflower fan at the best of times, but balloon's style of tuning (which after hearing his most recent release I've come to suspect is intentional) makes her sound even more like a strangled child than most vflower songs do. I hate that shrieky way her voice goes up on the chorus, the way it gets swallowed up by the instrumentation.

But I do like Rain and Petra generally, as a concept. I like the melody, the lyrics, Avogado6's moody scribbly MV. I just like it better when someone else is singing it.

I don't remember how I stumbled on his self-cover of Charles. Probably Youtube Autoplay again. "Well, it's not flower, so it's probably better," I thought, and then the vocals kicked in. It turns out Keina Suda's voice has a lot of what I don't like about his tuning style! But unlike the flower version of Rain and Petra, Keina Suda's Charles actually grew on me. I still won't say I like his singing, but I don't hate it as much as I hate, for example, Syudou's Miku version of Useewa for Project Sekai, which I think could be used as a torture device.

I haven't listened to his back catalog extensively yet, but what I have heard from his balloon days tends towards the sadder, more melancholy side. I mean, his commissioned song for Project Sekai was for Team Depression (Nightcord at 25:00. I'm assuming most of the people reading this are not familiar with the intricacies of the Proseka Lore).

When I started watching the Skip and Loafer anime and Mellow started playing, my first thought was, "no way, it's that guy?! Wait, he can do happy music?! For real?!" And then the credits rolled and I was right it was Keina Suda making a poppy happy slice of life anime OP. Listening closer, it did sound like him-- his instrumentation style, his penchant for repetition, and of course, his voice. Which I still didn't like. I wished they'd done that thing where the voice actors sing the openings and endings. By the way, the animation sequence for the OP was absolutely gorgeous, if you haven't seen it. But what I realized a few days later was that Mellow was, in fact, catchy as hell. I'd be making tea and thinking "koi da to shitara..."

"Huh. I wonder what else he's done that sounds like this," I thought, and then put on Ghost Pop.

Mellow was on there, but so was Nomad, his commissioned Team Depression song (which was slower and weepier than Charles, the other balloon song in the game that was also assigned to Team Depression. Rain and Petra was added later for Vivid Bad Squad [Team Streetwear] and the in-game cover was actually not as bad as it could be. Okay, sidebar over). So, feeling a little disappointed before I even hit play, I assumed the album would be mostly Nomad-like songs, and not Mellow-like songs. A leopard can't change its shorts after all.

I was wrong! The first song on the album, Love Sick, is in fact, exactly like Mellow: bright, upbeat, catchy, poppy, brazenly romantic from the title onward. It honestly sounds like it could make for great tiktok audio: I was surprised I didn't find any clips set to it when I searched. There's a strong beat. I still don't like his voice, but I like it better in this than in some of his other songs. I don't feel like he's trying too hard, and he does have a few fun effects on it. Generally, it feels like every song on this album is doing different things, which is always pleasant to hear from an album. I do not like every song on the album (Howdy is far weepier than I can tolerate. When I said I've listened to it all the way through 4 times I do usually skip  Howdy), but I do like more than one of them. Most of them are pretty upbeat, at least. And this duet version of Young & Foolish on his channel is really cool! His songs do, in my opinion, generally sound better when other people are singing them!

But I think his singing's growing on me.

I've been doing a lot of things, but this is the most immediate/recent thing. I've mentioned Pinocchio-P before in this post, and also mentioned that I'm a big fan. The reason I was listening to his music all day is he just released a new video featuring Rin (the last time he used Rin was eight whole years ago!) and then I clicked into his playlist of music videos and it was just nice to have in the background.
Pinocchio-P's trademark is using his own voice to support and back up the vocaloid voices. In his live shows, as demonstrated in this recording of Whatever Yama Says Goes, he treats it as a sort of duet with Miku's prerecorded vocals, singing live while Miku sings from the computer on account of she is not real. I love how he's just. He is just Some Guy. The archetypal Some Guy. In a red hat. I want to see him live so bad. Anyway, he works with the vocaloid voices to create a feeling of collaboration. Miku is the star, but Pinocchio-P helps make her shine.
I also love how much he loves vocaloid for what it is. He has no less than 3 songs explicitly about how much he loves vocaloid and Miku. (Because You're Here, The Vocaloid Songs Ten Years Later, and Vocaloids Are Lame). A lot of producers move on from making vocaloid music and find success as solo artists singing themselves, but Pinocchio-P chooses to continue making music with vocaloid, because he likes it. He makes non-vocaloid stuff sometimes as well, but he seems to have a lot of respect for the scene as a whole, and I like that.
Pinocchio-P's work is niche, deliberately so. He's said in an interview before "if I was the most popular vocaloid producer, that'd be a sign that something's wrong with the scene." His songs feature upbeat electronic melodies and lyrics about subjects as wide-ranging as onions and Buddhist death gods. But they're catchy and fun and I like them. My favorite is Yozurina.

Next time: possibly Russian rock? Possibly urban fantasy thoughts? We'll see.

Kenshi Yonezu dropped a new music video yesterday and! It! SLAPS!

I've been a fan of his music since I was in middle school, when Yonezu was making Vocaloid songs under the name "Hachi" and I was watching his self-drawn music videos of those songs with English subtitles by vgperson. He was always a star in the Vocaloid scene-- Pinocchio-P even said in this interview "Probably everyone was watching not because it was Vocaloid, but because it was Hachi. I get the impression of that charisma spilling out of the cup of Vocaloid and becoming Kenshi Yonezu."

And he's been so successful! He did the first opening theme to the second season of My Hero Academia (Peace Sign), he held a concert in Fortnite to promote his latest album, he wrote a song for the 2020 Olympics, he launched a fashion line for Uniqlo which sold out instantly and the store on fifth avenue in New York City was decorated in the album artwork he drew for himself. I'm so proud of this guy!

His music isn't just good, it's uniquely his, ugly emotions and difficult topics conveyed with poetic lyrics and skillful instrumentation. As Kenshi Yonezu, he pushes his own voice to an emotionality his vocaloid songs had never reached, creating songs that sound raw and intimate.

However, he's also notoriously shy. Yonezu doesn't really like performing live and doesn't do it often. What's so stunning about this new video for "Shinigami" is how he pushes himself to perform in it, as himself, acting with his face and whole body, allowing the camera angles to catch glimpses of his eyes. It's compelling. It's magnetic. It's that charisma Pinocchio-P mentioned as being a part of who Kenshi Yonezu is.

"Shinigami" takes inspiration from a traditional rakugo story, and reminds me of older songs Yonezu made as Hachi like "Musunde Hiraite Rasetsu to Mukuro" (which, sidenote, I can't believe he drew the video for that all by himself! with a mouse! He HAS the range!). His body of work shows he's always been fascinated with mythology and storytelling, and when he says "with Shinigami I did only what I liked," I believe it.

If you've never heard of this guy before reading this post, his latest single release (including Shinigami) is on Spotify, and so is his last full album Stray Sheep (which I love a lot). Some of his best new songs (in my opinion) are Kanden, Flamingo, Horse and Deer, and also Shunrai from his previous album. As classic as his vocaloid music is, it's also older and less polished. But Matryoshka was my favorite song in 8th grade, so.

I like him! There you go.